The present application concerns a header for attachment to an agricultural machine, comprising a frame, driven moveable cutting means held therein and driven movable conveying means, and a gearbox for transmitting the drive force onto the cutting means and the conveying means.
Headers of the aforementioned kind are known, for example, as grain headers which can be attached to a combine harvester. As a result of their great working width, the headers are not connected to be fast with the combine harvester but are easily attachable and detachable in order to be able to drive the combine harvesters without headers on public roads for transfer from one field to another field. Between the combine harvester and the header, there is therefore a defined interface by means of which the header can be simply detached from and attached again to the combine harvester. In this context, in addition to the holders that hold the header according to purely static requirements, also electrical, mechanical, and hydraulic connections for driving and controlling various work functions of the header must be easily separable and re-connectable in order to simplify and accelerate the attachment and detachment of the header.
Often, buyers of combine harvesters will buy their header from the manufacturer who also has produced the combine harvester so that the combine harvester and the header are matched to each other. However, it is often also the case that manufacturers of special headers such as maize pickers, soybean headers, draper headers, and the like produce and sell headers that have even better technical properties in comparison to the header products of the combine harvester manufacturers. In these cases, the customer buys a header from a manufacturer who is not identical with the manufacturer of the combine harvester. In such cases, the header must also properly function on the third-party make of the combine harvester. This can be a problem for the manufacturer of the header when the rotary speeds of the auxiliary drives of individual combine harvester manufacturers differ, in particular the rotary speed of the power take-off shaft at the front end of the feed channel from which the mechanical drive actions of a header receive their drive force.
In order to be able to operate the header during harvest at the rotary speed level predetermined respectively by the manufacturer, the manufacturers of the special headers must make available different gearbox versions in which the rotary speeds of the output shaft of the combine harvester are increased or decreased to a matching level for the attachment of their header to the respective combine harvester makes. This causes a significant expenditure in the construction, the production, and logistics. Also, a used header with the respective gearbox can only be resold to an interested person who has a corresponding combine harvester make so as not to have to exchange the complete gearbox.
It is the object of the present invention to reduce the expenditure for the rotary speed adaptation of headers to the rotary speed level of different combine harvester manufacturers.